Video Vault: Characters carry dark holiday film

Friday

Apr 25, 2008 at 12:01 AMApr 25, 2008 at 6:48 PM

Though it begins on Christmas Eve and winds up the next morning, “The Ice Harvest” is not your typical yuletide movie. It’s a razor-sharp, pitch-black dark comedy that manages to be funny, bloody, surprising and smart.

Will Pfeifer

Though it begins on Christmas Eve and winds up the next morning, “The Ice Harvest” is not your typical yuletide movie. It’s a razor-sharp, pitch-black dark comedy that manages to be funny, bloody, surprising and smart.

John Cusack plays Charlie, a mob lawyer who teams up with Vic (Billy Bob Thornton) to steal $2 million from a Wichita, Kan., mob boss (Randy Quaid). But naturally, everything that possibly can go wrong does, and pretty soon the money’s lost, the bodies are piling up, and that mob boss is very, very angry.

One of the pleasures of “The Ice Harvest” is how it keeps introducing memorable characters. There’s Connie Nielsen as a strip-club manager, Ned Bellamy as an angry bartender and Oliver Platt as Pete, the drunken husband of Charlie’s ex-wife. His Christmas Eve dinner entrance is worth the price of a rental all by itself.

The DVD also includes two alternate endings, but I’m glad director Harold Ramis went with the one he chose. After all that darkness and violence, “The Ice Harvest” needed to have its cold heart warm up — even if it’s just by a couple of degrees.

Will Pfeifer writes about new DVDs on Tuesdays and older ones on Sundays. Contact him at wpfeifer@rrstar.com or 815-987-1244. You can also read his Movie Man blog at blogs.e-rockford.com/movieman.

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